Camera Event at the ECA Fair

I conducted a workshop in the sculpture court with my pinhole cameras, asking people to respond to the space by drawing on the film, and asking them how they felt about the process, about the object, or the process of recording with it… I was going to ask them to label themselves, and then bring themselves into the image but the people that I did that with seemed to get a little scared, and didn’t want to draw or write, they seemed to find it confusing. So, I changed it to be about a response to the object.

it would be interesting to make a few more of them and get a smaller group to use them for a longer period of time and to talk about how they feel about trying to record with such an ephemeral medium, through drawing with a pen, they are forced to respond in a personal way… (impressionism/photography?—impressionist cameras?)

I still need to go through all the information, of course, and that’s going to take some time, I think. it’s possible that the more interesting thing will be what they wrote in response to my question about the object than the drawing itself. over time the workshop changed to be more about the feeling of the object, than the drawing itself. There were a few things that happened during the afternoon that I hadn’t anticipated, which was awesome. I took some video through the lens of the camera while people were drawing, and that was really interesting… I hadn’t even looked at them that way before. it would be interesting to have the objects I make be like that, two sided, larger… I should engrave on the surface of the lens and see how much it effects the projection. Also, Some people started using the cameras in pairs, one person at the camera drawing, one person further away telling them what to do. What was interesting about that is that the drawings seems to have been less tentative…